Ordinary People

In nonindustrial settings, MCS substances are the cause of indoor air pollution and are the contaminants in air and water. Many of the chemicals which trigger MCS symptoms are known to be irritants or toxic to the nervous system. As an example, volatile organic compounds readily evaporate into the air at room temperature. Permitted airborne levels of such contaminants can still make ordinary people sick. When the human body is assaulted with levels of toxic chemicals that it cannot safely process, it is likely that at some point an individual will become ill. For some, the outcome could be cancer or reproductive damage. Others may become hypersensitive to these chemicals or develop other chronic disorders, while some people may not experience any noticeable health effects. Even where high levels of exposure occur, generally only a small percentage of people become chemically sensitive. 

Were it not for the fact that the great heroes and spiritual leaders of mankind have spoken in mystic terms it would be easy to discount their experience as insane.—From Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar... 

These genealogies, of course, take their point of origin not in ordinary people but in heroic figures who fought enemies, even villains, and who won their battles by wit and dexterity. Lavoisier s triumph over the evil forces of Georg Stahl and phlogiston theory is well known, and unlike most heroic scientists, Lavoisier met a martyr s end in the epic events of the French Revolution. This is historical mythology, a crucial constitutive element of the discipline. 3 5... 

Ev and I had parted earlier in 1975. Our relationship of convenience formed on the road had not flowered after we returned to careers and school stateside. Ev quickly found work and I did not. Later she enrolled in secretarial school and I went back to Cal to finish my degree in Conservation of Natural Resources. How far we seemed to have fallen from the exaulted vistas revealed at La Cho-rrera. Our lives were financially marginal, intellectually constrained, and eventually our attachments and interests went elsewhere. When the breakup finally came it was ugly and heartrending. We may have seen into the heart of the mysteries, but that did not mean that we were any wiser than ordinary people when it came to the affairs of our own hearts. Ev departed from my life in the company of an old friend of mine from my days at the Experimental College, and I was left confused and defensive by what felt like a double betrayal. 

In The Chemical Treatise of Thomas Norton, the Englishman, called Believe-me, or the Ordinal of Alchemy (15th century), the adept is warned not to disclose his secrets to ordinary people. 

Waters, Robert A. The Best Defense True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves -with a Firearm. Nashville, Tenn. Cumberland House, 1998. A collection of vivid accounts of ordinary people who used guns to defend themselves against attackers. Waters explores both their thoughts and feelings and the response of police and society in general the book leans to strong gun rights advocacy. 

Advances also often come in two parts, half upon signing the book contract, the other half upon acceptance of the final manuscript or publication of the book. This two-stage advance has led to interesting speculation about the prolific American short-story writer O. Henry. He was a master of surprise endings and often wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. The New York World paid him 100 for each of his stories, but because O. Henry did not always deliver his story by the deadline, his editor made sure only to pay half of the advance for the first half of the story and refused to pay the rest until the entire story was received. Some critics have said that this led to O. Henry stories with the second half nearly unrelated to the first Apparently, O. Henry sometimes rushed out anything he could for the first half of the story just to get the 50 and then ignored much of what he had written when completing the tale. 

There are many arguments for the rational-expectations hypothesis. In the simple cobweb cycle, and even with adaptive expectations, we must assume that each agent believes himself to be the only one to adjust rationally to the circumstances and that others act in a more or less mechanical way But this is an irrational belief, which we should not impute to people without evidence. It is surely more plausible to assume that people believe others to be as rational as themselves. Also, in a rapidly changing world people would be silly to pay much attention to the past. When oil prices quadrupled in 1973, the prices of oil before 1973 lost all relevance as guides to future prices. And if ordinary people understood much less of the economy than economists do, we would expect the latter to make much more money than they in fact do. The reason economists don t make a killing by outguessing the market is that the market has access to whatever information they have and can use it just as efficiently. ... 

Use of crack declined in the 1990s due to crackdowns on street traffickers, the outrage of ordinary people in affected communities, and perhaps also because even confirmed drug users began to stay away from a drug known to be a particularly fast route to self-destruction. 

Retirement for ordinary people is a phenomenon of modern, industrialized society. At the turn of the Twentieth century, the at-birth life expectancy for American men was 45 years. This didn t leave much time for retirement. On the average, for the few who made it, retirement lasted fewer than five years. 

Yet they are almost never identified as d-SoCs in ordinary people, for several reasons. 

The d-ASCs experienced by almost all ordinary people are dreaming states and the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, the transitional states between sleeping and waking. Many others experience another d-ASC, alcohol intoxication. 

Hideki Shirakawa was born in Tokyo on August 20, 1936. He was the third of five children born to Hatsutarou Shirakawa, a physician, and his wife, Fuyuno Shirakawa. In the first dozen years of his life, Hideki Shirakawa moved frequently with his family, first to the rural city of Takayama, then to the province of Manchu on the Chinese mainland (then recently conquered by the Japanese army), and finally backto Tokyo and Takayama after the end of World War II. As early as junior high school, Shirakawa was thinking about a career in the field of polymers. He wrote an essay in which he expressed a desire to "conduct research on plastics useful for ordinary people."... 

Fuming flasks, white lab coats, explosions, toxic substances—these are images that often come to mind when people think of chemists and chemistry. For ordinary people, chemistry is often vastly misunderstood and is often considered too difficult to grasp. Steve Zumdahl (1993) writes that it is impossible to define (chemistry) concisely because the field is so diverse and because its practitioners perform such an incredible variety of jobs. This statement provides a much broader vision of chemistry than simply the study of matter. An understanding of chemical concepts is essential not only for chemistry majors but also for other science majors and even students with undecided majors as it leads to a richer understanding of other science disciplines, health fields, and societal issues. 

In the main experiment, 16 dishes were evaluated using a panel consisted of 300 ordinary people with the panel size for each session being 25 to 50. Each panelist was given a test sample added MSG and a control. The panelists were asked to compare the test sample against the control, and to evaluate the flavor of the test sample checking off the point on each scale of the evaluation sheet. 

The biggest source of oil pollution comes from the everyday use of oil by ordinary people. Oil that is dumped into water in urban areas adds to oil pollution from ships and tankers. In total, three million tonnes of oil reach the ocean each year. This is equivalent to having an oil spill disaster every day ... 

Supporters of the new clue believe that something can be done to photograph such an image with a microscope, and so put crime beyond the reach of most ordinary people.57... 

Here s a quick review of what you learned in Lesson 1. Reality TV has the ability to take ordinary people and make them famous. However, another reason people participate in reality TV shows is... 

This tradition of resistance at the dacha has continued into the post-Soviet period. Several informants pointed out that much like Kasyanov, even ordinary people turn to their dachas to resist the changes in allocation and privatization laws currently taking place in Russia. Even as building codes have eased and taxes on produce have been eliminated, post-Soviet citizens find other ways to articulate their views on the state of their new society. Like many apartment dwellers across the country, many dacha owners choose not to pay their utility bills. Others sneak into the fields of private farms to harvest fresh produce or borrow building materials for their own personal use. 

Even as dachas, forests, and the countryside offer compelling and profound commentaries on Russian political and economic development, they are not related only to national political and economic transformations, which have too often been the preoccupation of civil society analyses. Instead, natural spaces are the sites where ordinary people engage in the small-scale political activities that constitute their daily lives. Public debate and commentary—as well as efforts to create distinctions between public and private, carve out spaces of safety and well-being, and form asso-ciational groups, among many other practices—constitute the smaller and more personal, but no less significant, activities of civil society work that take place in the natural sector. 

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